Tiny Slits Within The Timeline Of A Year

Buttonholes For Golden Buttons And The Appearances Of Small Magic

There are seasons and markers in the lives of others all around you that you almost certainly know nothing about, …holy days, events and celebrations that return, year after year, anticipated or dreaded, observed fondly or endured reluctantly.

Sticking only to a handful of the little, positive ones for this story, there’s blackberry season, of course, and huckleberry season too.

Then there’s the first fresh Sockeye Salmon of the year and the first Rufous Hummingbird to appear in the garden.

Cherries and apricots each merit an arrival celebration if you ask me, but certainly no more than the first, perfect ears of sweet corn roasted on the grill or the magical appearance of Chanterelles in the fall.

Obviously, your holy days will be different from mine depending on your childhood, where you live, your Grannie (if you were lucky enough to have one), your six-year old best friend, the shape of your heart and your all-grown-up willingness to notice little moments of sweetness and wonder, but I bet you get the idea…

So, how many of you knew that for the past week or so it has been Tansy Season? I’m gonna go way out on a limb here and guess, however wildly that there may be less than a million of you. But the fact that many in this moment aren’t even clear on what Tansy is, let alone that one of us is currently celebrating its beloved ‘season’ makes this holy time no less real.

Tansy, you see, Common Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare), not Tansy Ragwort (Jacobaea vulgaris), is a magical plant whose blooming creates a small rend in the fabric of time, a buttonhole, if you will through which wisps of magic and fairy dust may enter your imagination. Of course, we’re talking ‘small letter magic,’ not ‘all caps MAGIC,’ more like a sun-warmed slice of perfect, sweet watermelon, not some pink, rainbow-tooting, unicorn winging its way across the sky at sunrise.

This is the season when at least one of us here heads out into the fields and byways looking for a patch of wild tansy; tall stiff stemmed, pungent, fern-leafed stalks of deep yellow button flowers swaying in the breeze.

Each year I cut numerous stalks of Common Tansy, strip them of their pungent, fernlike leaves (which I put in a brown paper lunch sack in the back of my closet to keep the moths away), then bundle them into decorative upside down bouquets to hang at the back door, which during the warm/hot days of summer we tend to leave open for airflow, neighborly “You-hoo”s, conversations with hummingbirds and views of the garden.

Tansy, you see is an all natural insect deterrent. And though it does not actually keep every fly and flying insect from entering the house the way, you know, a clear, ziplock bag of water with a few pennies in it suspended above the door might, it looks so dang cool hanging there and carries so much old-time lore that I do it every year.

It just makes me happy, and that is reason enough.

Happy Tansy Season, my friends and fellow seekers of small magic. May something wonderful find you today and whisper your name in the breeze.

Tansy, you see, is a magical plant whose blooming creates a small rend in the fabric of time, a buttonhole, if you will through which wisps of magic and fairy dust may enter your imagination.